Too shallow to be damned?
Eliot's "instability of selfhood"
From Chapter 1 T.S. Eliot
[....] Eliot put to good use the instability of selfhood which his spiritual and then literal exile had brought him. It meant that he could ‘decentre’ himself all the more readily into literary tradition, the Anglican Church, a corporate culture, the resources of a collective mythology and what he liked to call the European mind. Like his friend James Joyce, he discovered that those who are strangers at home are able to belong more or less anywhere. As with many a modernist, his art was nourished by the fact that he was at once inside and outside the civilisation in which he settled. Perhaps a certain sexual ambiguity in his early years (he circulated some of his gay pornographic verse among a coterie of friends) reinforced this duality. In some ways, the alien can see more than the native: Eliot comments of Rudyard Kipling, who spent part of his early life in India, that his experience of another country gave him an understanding of England that the English themselves would do well to heed. To choose a cultural allegiance, as Eliot did, signifies a deeper commitment than that of the average insider; yet at the same time the insiders have the edge over you, since – having the culture and tradition in their blood – they do not need to make a conscious issue out of it.
[....]Like many of his fellow modernists, Eliot had little but contempt for most aspects of actual civilisation, with its godless materialism, worship of the machine, cult of utility, spiritual vacancy and bogus humanitarianism. In this, he is at one with F.R. Leavis, as we shall see later; but whereas Leavis’s religion is in effect the philosophy of D.H. Lawrence, Eliot’s is staunchly Anglo-Catholic. The love of man and woman, he remarks witheringly, is either made reasonable by a higher (i.e. divine) love, or else it is simply the coupling of animals. ‘If you remove from the word “human” all that the belief in the supernatural has given to man’, he warns, ‘you can view him finally as no more than an extremely clever, adaptable and mischievous little animal’ (SE, p. 485). He praises Machiavelli, of all rebarbative thinkers, for his low estimate of humanity, as well as for his promotion of order over liberty (FLA, pp. 46, 50). It is Eliot’s conviction that the number of individuals in any generation capable of intellectual effort is very small. Indeed, he seems to derive a well-nigh erotic frisson from the phrase ‘only a very few’. He would no doubt have been deeply rattled had the minuscule readership of his journal the Criterion shot up by 10 thousand overnight.
Most men and women, like the Hollow Men of Eliot’s poem of that title, are too spiritually shallow even to be damned, which means that ‘the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform’ (SE, p. 429). In a faithless age, the idea of hell is to his mind a considerable source of comfort. Writing in the age of Auschwitz, he declares in the spirit of Charles Baudelaire that it is better to do evil than to do nothing. Evil people, as opposed to the merely immoral, are at least acquainted with higher spiritual realities, in however negative a fashion. Humanism overlooks what for Eliot is perhaps the most fundamental of all Christian dogmas: original sin. Humans are wretched creatures, and humility is consequently the greatest of Christian virtues. (For the Christian orthodoxy which Eliot is supposed to uphold, the greatest virtue is in fact charity, of which the other virtues are so many versions.) The Romantic faith in the potential infinitude of humanity is a dangerous illusion. So is the ideal of progress so zealously promulgated by the middle classes. Eliot’s poetry is full of journeys either not undertaken, abandoned or ending in disenchantment. It would seem that history neither improves nor deteriorates. ‘I do not mean that our times are particularly corrupt’, he writes; ‘all times are corrupt’ (SE, p. 387). Yet it is clear elsewhere in his work that the modern era represents a drastic falling-off from the age of belief which preceded it. Like many a conservative thinker, Eliot equivocates between the view that things are getting steadily worse and the claim that they have been pretty appalling from the outset.
[....]By this point, the enlightened reader may well be wondering whether anything of value can be salvaged from this full-blooded reactionary. The answer is surely affirmative. For one thing, Eliot’s elitism, anti-Semitism, class prejudice, demeaning estimate of humanity and indiscriminate distaste for modern civilisation are the stock in trade of the so-called Kulturkritik tradition which he inherits.4 Many an eminent twentieth-century intellectual held views of this kind, and so did a sizeable proportion of the Western population of the time. This doesn’t excuse their attitudes, but it helps to explain them. For another thing, such attitudes put Eliot at loggerheads with the liberal-capitalist ideology of his age. He is, in short, a radical of the right, like a large number of his fellow modernists. He believes in the importance of communal bonds, as much liberal ideology does not; he also rejects capitalism’s greed, selfish individualism and pursuit of material self-interest. ‘The organisation of society on the principle of private profit’, he writes, ‘as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and so to the exhaustion of natural resources . . . a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly’ (ICS, pp. 61–2). There is nothing here with which an ecologically minded socialist would disagree. His first published review, of a handful of books on India, is strongly anti-imperialist. He is hostile to a social order which exalts the solitary ego, and which jettisons the past as dead and done with. For his part, Eliot understands that the past is what we are mostly made of, and that to nullify it in the name of progress is to annihilate much that is precious. It is thus that he can write that by abandoning tradition, we loosen our grip on the present.
Radicals of the left may reject the inheritance to which Eliot pays homage, but this is not to suggest that they are opposed to tradition as such. It is rather that they embrace alternative lineages – that of the Levellers, Diggers, Jacobins, Chartists, Suffragettes, for example. ‘We Marxists have always lived in tradition’, observes Leon Trotsky in his Literature and Revolution. ‘A society is poor indeed if it has nothing to live by but its own immediate and contemporary experience’, writes Raymond Williams in Culture and Society 1780–1950.5 The idea of tradition is by no means benighted in itself. It encompasses both the monarchy and the freedom to press for its abolition. If Trooping the Colour is traditional, so is the right to strike. In the modern age, Eliot protests, there is a provincialism not of space but of time, for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and have now been scrapped – a viewpoint for which ‘the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares’ (OPP, p. 72). The Marxist Walter Benjamin would have heartily agreed, along with critics of the conversion of history into a readily consumable commodity known as ‘heritage’. Eliot goes on to speak of ‘our continued veneration for our ancestors’ (OPP, p. 245); but in practice, as we shall see, his approach to the past is a good deal more innovative and iconoclastic than such piety would suggest. ‘Veneration’ is not quite the word for his scathing assessment of Milton or most eighteenth-century verse.
Nor does Eliot accept the arid rationalism which underpins the modern order, with its indifference to kinship, affection, the body and the unconscious. Confronted with the creed that men and women are wholly self-determining, he insists instead on their finitude and fragility, an awareness of which belongs to the virtue of humility. Human beings are dependent on each other, as well as on some larger whole. For Eliot, as for D.H. Lawrence, we do not belong to ourselves. The idea that we can ‘possess’ our selves like a piece of property is a bourgeois fantasy. The attachment to a specific place which Eliot admires may have sinister overtones of blood and soil, but it also serves in our own time as a rebuke to global capitalism – to the jet-setting CEOs who feel at home only in an airport VIP lounge. A belief in social order need not be authoritarian; it may rather be an alternative to the anarchy of the marketplace. It may also be preferable to a liberal civilisation in which everyone may believe more or less what they want – but only because convictions don’t matter much in any case, and because the idea of human solidarity has withered at the root.
In this sense, Eliot is as much a critic of the social orthodoxies of his day as, say, George Orwell or George Bernard Shaw. It is just that his critique is launched from the right rather than the left. It is true that the case smacks of self-contradiction, since in practice Eliot was a loyal servant of the very capitalism which fragments community, junks tradition and has scant regard for spirituality. The alternative in his eyes would be communism; and when he wonders aloud how he would choose between communism or fascism, he plumps for the latter. He regarded the Russian Revolution as the most momentous event of the First World War, and viewed the conflict between the Soviet Union and ‘Latin’ civilisation as a spiritual war between Asia and Europe. Yeats believed much the same. In fact, the battle against Bolshevism is high on the Criterion’s agenda.
[....]conservatives like Eliot believe in the church, tradition, the monarchy, a decentralised society and a paternalist aristocracy, none of which is in the least congenial to fascism. Nor is the idea of social hierarchy, since fascism knows only one social distinction, that between the Leader and the people. Fascism regards itself as a revolutionary creed, whereas conservatism of course does not. Like all brands of nationalism, fascism is a thoroughly modern invention, despite its invocation of Nordic gods and ancient heroes. Conservatism has a lengthier pedigree.
Both brands of politics have a high regard for rural society; but whereas the Nazis spoke in demonic terms of blood and soil, the conservative thinks rather more angelically of village fetes and Morris dancers. The conservative is devoted to the family, the local community and civil society, while the fascist pays allegiance only to Leader, race and nation. Fascist societies glorify violence and are usually on a permanent military footing, which is not the case with conservative ones. They are run by a brutally authoritarian state, whereas Eliot’s type of politics favours regionalism rather than centralism. In fact, it was fascism which helped to wind up the Criterion on the eve of the Second World War. It had become clear that the cultural equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire which the journal hoped to see re-established was yielding in Continental Europe to an altogether more sinister form of imperial power. The classical ‘European mind’, Eliot laments in the final edition of the journal, has disappeared from view, even though it was never clear how a periodical whose circulation probably never topped eight hundred was going to put it back on its feet.
[....]Eliot is less hidebound by his conservatism than one might expect. Nor is his attitude to tradition at all traditional. On the contrary, his reconstruction of the concept is one of his most renowned critical innovations, and the essay in which it is to be found, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, one of the most celebrated critical statements of the twentieth century. For such a youthful author, it is an astonishingly bold, authoritative piece of argument. It proposes what one might call a modernist notion of tradition, one which has broken with a linear, one-thing-after-another conception of literary history. The idea of tradition must be rescued from the middle-class delusion of progress, upward evolution and perpetual improvement; and if literature is a convenient means of challenging this self-satisfied ideology, it is partly because there is indeed no simple upward trek from Horace to Margaret Atwood. In Eliot’s view, tradition is a two-way street. It works backwards as well as forwards, since the present alters the past just as much as the past gives birth to the present. The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presentness. As so often with modernism, we are speaking of a form of spatialised time, so that a poet writes ‘with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order’ (SE, p. 14).
[....]A way of writing, Eliot observes in To Criticize the Critic, can come to feel stale and shop-soiled, no longer responsive to contemporary modes of feeling, thought and speech, in which case a poetic revolution may prove essential. Such an upheaval is greeted at first with affront and disdain, but finally comes to be seen as vitalising rather than destructive, lending a fresh lease of life to the heritage it appears to undercut. Its legitimacy will finally be acknowledged, rather like that of property stolen many centuries ago. There are times when you need to deviate in order to stay in line. One test of a work’s value, Eliot claims, is that it ‘fits in’ with what has gone before. Conformity is the decisive criterion. But how exactly does ‘Prufrock’ do that, however sophisticated one’s sense of what counts as fitting in? Eliot commends Samuel Johnson’s belief that innovation must remain within the bounds of propriety, but this may be one instance of a mismatch between his theory and his practice. ‘Proper’ is the last word one would use of his early poetry.
There is another problem as well. The entry of a newcomer into the tradition ensures that the past is kept alive; but if it does so by altering the values, proportions and relations of existing works, then this view of literary history opens the door to relativism. Eliot is rightly opposed to treating works of art in isolation; instead, they draw their significance from their place in a larger formation (tradition), and can be truly judged only by mutual comparison. (This view may stem in part from his study of the late nineteenth-century philosopher F.H. Bradley, for whom the reality of an object lies in its relations with others.)
Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read (2022) by Terry Eagleton
